The Paris 6

By CATHY HORYN

Published: April 28, 2005

LATE last February, over lunch in a Paris restaurant, Stefano Pilati, the new designer at Yves Saint Laurent, offered a surprising motive for putting modern-thinking women in tulip skirts and high-necked polka-dot blouses, things that had struck critics as repressively feminine. ''My aim was to say, 'We're a fashion elite here,''' Mr. Pilati said. And he is determined to lead. ''We should. We're supposed to.''

You don't have to be a fan of the reality show ''Project Runway'' to appreciate that fashion has become more and more populist. This is the age, after all, of the adolescent designer, the celebrity designer, the hip-hop designer, and the claimants have been as varied as Sean Combs and Esteban Cortazar, who was 18 when he held his first show.

And though fashion, like politics, is still an insider's game, with its own addicts and agenda-setting editors, nothing, it seems, can compete with the authentic judgment of bloggers and Web viewers. Ask yourself: How elitist can fashion be when the 20 most popular fall 2005 collections on Style.com received a total of 22 million hits in 12 days?

Nevertheless, by the end of the fall shows in March, Mr. Pilati's assertion had been borne out. On the strength of an exceptional series of Paris collections, a new elite had emerged, and with it a sense that every choice these designers made, every proportion and fabric chosen or rejected, represented a superior judgment. They were acting like designers, not stylists or vintage-shop pickers. Retailers, starved for direction, saw the shows as a breakthrough. In New York, despite an influx of new talent, only Marc Jacobs had the power to influence the industry, whether an editor at Cond?ast or the owner of an illicit handbag palace on Canal Street. Milan had Miuccia Prada. In Paris there were six.

Insiders may debate who belongs in this elite class, but they don't dispute the authority of Mr. Pilati, Olivier Theyskens at Rochas, Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Phoebe Philo at Chlo?nd Mr. Jacobs, who designs his own line and another for Louis Vuitton.

Even fashion industry analysts, who tend to be skeptical of the pronouncements of editors, acknowledge the influence of these designers, whose average age is 35. David Wolfe, the creative director of Doneger Group, which forecasts trends for stores like Nordstrom and Wal-Mart, compares it to that of the Antwerp Six, a group that included Dries van Noten and Martin Margiela, in the early 90's. ''They feel the pulse of their times the same way the Belgians did,'' he said. ''And they have the same problem. Everybody feeds off them, except now there's an expectation that your company has to be as big as General Motors. Or Tom Ford.''

Is it the air, the Gallic water, les girls? What unites these six designers, only one of whom can claim French birth, and why now? The answer, as simple as it sounds, is fashion.

For several years now, the business has followed a different set of imperatives: fashion as lifestyle, fashion as art, fashion as a spree of casual Fridays. Twenty or 30 years ago, when the Japanese avant-garde designers arrived in Paris, and before that, when Yves Saint Laurent and Kenzo were telling everyone how to dress -- well, back then it was only fashion as fashion.

Gradually, though, it wasn't cool to be a dictator. And anyway, designers didn't have time. They had empires of licenses to manage, yachts to squeegee. By the time Ms. Prada and Mr. Ford exploded, in the mid-1990's, nobody except a few couturiers at the top knew about hidden seams and hand-frayed edges. And if one may say so, the whole picture of dress had degenerated to a logo bag and a pierced navel.

Nowadays people are dressing better. It's as if the entire industry has been squeezed upward. As Mr. Wolfe put it, ''Even the bottom feeders of the fashion food chain have Champagne tastes.'' Everyone wants to look posh.

Like most mainstream trends this one started with an extreme gesture, a squawk (the sound of editors' mouths popping open) at the beginning of the fashion grapevine. You can almost pinpoint the moment: Paris, March 2003, when Mr. Theyskens, a Belgian designer then just 26, showed a weird humpback dress in French lace. Weird or not, it telegraphed a message to the rest of the industry: clothes would involve more form, and more savoir-faire.

And Mr. Theyskens wasn't alone. ''They're the most daring group of designers we've seen in a long while,'' said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York. ''Alber dared to be pretty, and with clothes that a lot of women can wear. Olivier changed the way we look at luxury, by focusing on extreme proportions and beautiful craft. It's now bye-bye, bling. Nicolas has influenced the street. Look at his cargo pants. People were, like, 'Baggy pants in pink and green -- what?' But those pants and their copies made stores millions of dollars.''

WHAT unites these designers is that they are using details and craft, often involving old modes of construction, to make an original statement. Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, an influential art director whose clients include Lanvin, says there is a dual advantage in using couture effects like draping. It makes the clothes harder to copy, and it distances them that much further from superficial, Star magazine type of fashion. ''If a dress has volume, it's because Alber found a real dressmaking solution,'' Ms. Newhouse said. And he is thinking how to do it in a light, modern way. ''It's about both form and function,'' Mr. Elbaz said.